Francis Ford Coppola returns to 'personal filmmaking'

The Oscar-winning maker of films such as Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola, is to return to directing after an eight-year break in a big-screen adaptation of a Romanian short story.

Coppola (66) is set to begin production in Bucharest on October 3 on the low-budget Youth Without Youth, based on the novella by Romanian author and intellectual Mircea Eliade, according to entertainment bible Daily Variety.

The director, also famed for films such as The Godfather Part II and American Graffiti (1973), will self-finance the film, that will star actors Tim Roth, Alexandra Maria Lara, Switzerland’s Bruno Ganz and Marcel Iures.

The films tells the story of a professor whose life changes after a dramatic incident during in the run-up to World War II that forced him to flee his home as he is pursued through Romania, Romania, Switzerland, Malta and India.

“I was excited to discover, in this tale by Eliade, the key themes that I most hope to understand better: time, consciousness and the dreamlike basis of reality,” Coppola said in a statement.

“For me, it is indeed a return to the ambitions I had for work in cinema as a student,” he said of the film that his Zoetrope production company described as Coppola’s “return to personal filmmaking”.

The film will be Coppola’s first directorial effort since 1997’s The Rainmaker, as he has focused in recent years on producing and running his hotel and wine estate in California, complaining that Hollywood only offered him gangster pictures, according to Variety. - Sapa-AFP